30.7.13

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I posted here on the bike blog. Sam and I have been biking and advocating as much as ever, just not posting much about it.
I have been posting lots of art on my tumblr however, which you are welcome to follow: www.lost-in-line.tumblr.com
We've also been contributing to the bikeprovo.org blog occasionally. Check it out!
And finally, Sam and I moved to a new apartment last month and did it 100% by bicycle, which was super fun and fulfilled a dream I've had for awhile. I took a bit of video which you can watch on vimeo:Provo Utah Bike Move 2013 from Spencer Hawkes on Vimeo.

28.8.12

ok, we've been home for a couple weeks now and i'm ready to report on the second half of our trip. After Chicago we took the bus to Omaha, where my sister did a mission for our church, and visited a few of her friends and saw the beautiful winter quarters trail center. We arrived in Omaha in the morning, found a park, slept for a couple hours, ate our leftover jam and hummus on crackers and then wandered around. We weren't particularly impressed with the downtown which seemed kind of abandoned (although the park we slept in was quite beautiful). After visiting the trail center we got back on the greyhound which took us overnight to Denver where my uncle lives. Upon arriving in Denver we heard about the theater shooting which had happened in Aurora that very morning.
Staying with my aunt and uncle was fantastic. They were extrememly hospitable and we were able to get to know my little cousin Sean who we hadn't ever really spent much time with before. This was the only segment of our trip that did not involve wandering around a city. We spent the 3 days we were there hiking, swimming and kayaking. We didn't even set foot in Denver itself except when exiting and boarding the bus.
After Denver we took a strait shot ride to San Diego. With the exception of our initial SLC-BOS trip this was the longest of our rides. About 24 hours long if I recall correctly. When we arrived in San Diego Sam's sister picked us up from the bus station. We were instantly relieved by the cool weather! All through the midwest and even north east temperatures had been in the 90's or above. San Diego was perfect and breezy and we loved walking around for a couple of days. We wandered through the old town and saw the mormon battalion museum, took the train downtown and had lunch at the Gaslamp District near the convention center, and then hiked up to Balboa Park where every wednesday there are track races at the San Diego outdoor velodrome. We need a velodrome in Utah.

25.8.12

hello everyone! if you're wondering if i've thrown in the towel, chopped up my drafting table to use as kindling and given up art all together, you should start following my tumblr, where i will be posting all things art and leaving this blog to all things 2 wheeled and human powered. i will of course make sure any bike art shows up here as well. see you around!

20.8.12

welcome to the third and probably final post on the ins and outs of the Greyhound Discovery Pass. an important part of traveling is knowing how much money everything is going to cost. unless you buy some sort of vacation package with all expenses included, this can be difficult to estimate. Sam and I were not quite sure how much this whole thing would cost us beyond the cost of the pass itself, and looking up lodging costs in various cities. about a month before our planned departure we bought our 2 month bus passes online (to be picked up the day we began travel) and divided up our bank account funds toward things we wanted to do in different cities. for example, we knew we wanted to see a show on broadway, so we did some research and reserved 80$ towards that. i knew i wanted to buy french language comics in Toronto, so we put away 100$ towards that. we didn't know anyone to stay with in toronto, so we researched hostels, and sent out requests on couchsurfing.org. we were prepared to spend several hundred dollars on lodging in Toronto until a few weeks into the trip we got a good response on couchsurfing.org and took it. once we'd laid all of this down for the first few cities, we got very vague with our budgeting for the second half of the trip. we had no idea if we'd be totally broke halfway through and have to head home, or if we'd be eating peanut butter sandwiches for 30 days. the good news is we made it and quite comfortably! here's a few lists of real hard numbers showing what we spent, when, and on what. i wrote down our expenditures as we went along, but i'm sure i overlooked some minor ones, so take these as a good estimate. also take into account that we planned our trip partly to pass through cities where good friends and family lived, so in many cases we were shown such generosity that we hardly had to spend any money at all. lastly, these numbers reflect the costs of a couple who don't mind sharing every meal.

AVERAGE DAILY: about 30$
AVERAGE DAILY WITH 0$ DAYS REMOVED: about 50$

TOTAL SPENT ON THE ROAD: 1,851$
PLUS DISCOVERY PASSES: 2,979$

we had been saving for this trip for so long that it took us a little while to loosen up and realize we could finally spend our hard earned cash on things we'd denied ourselves for an entire year. (i honestly think i spent less than 50$ on comics since last summer) we spent almost everything we had saved, and now we're back to scraping by like usual, which is oddly refreshing.